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Monthly Archives: September 2008

I mentioned herebefore that I made a dual-boot out of my rig. What I didn’t mention is here I dumped Vista after a month and I replaced it with Windows XP… and I upgraded Gutsy to Hardy.. and that’s it.

It was perfect!

Hehe… I’ll list what I use in a day-to-day basis so you’ll have an idea why it make sense to use Linux.

All I need are the following:

Perl

Python

C/C++

MySQL DB server and client

Apache HTTP server

subversion

an ssh server and client

a good terminal/console application

a good editor, I use Vim/GVim

As you can see, these tools can be easily found in any Linux distro. It’s in it’s respective repositories…

So why, Why did I leave Linux and changed it to a crappy Vista?… *sigh*

It’s this… I have an Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 3945ABG WiFi and we have a WPA enabled wireless network.

In short, I can’t connect to a WPA network if I’m using Linux. The network manager will try to connect and after a long wait… nothing! A whole lot of nothing!!! It really sucks!!!

I can’t ask our network admin to change the authentication to WEP and I can’t use a wired connection all the time ( no unused port available near my station… ). Crap!

And so… after much thought… I decided to revert back to Vista… just because of a driver! *sigh*

I know that IDE’s exist, I’m no hermit. I’ve tried using Eclipse (also Easy) and I was a Kate user also. These editors have nice support for high level languages like Perl and Python… BUT I want my h,j,k,l shortcuts! If these IDEs have Vim key bindings, then maybe I’ll give it a second chance.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying Vim is the “silver bullet” among editors. I’m just saying it’s the best one in my opinion, hehe. Learning it, shortcuts and all, is steep, but once you get the hang of it, I’m pretty sure you’ll understand why I think it’s the best one. Vim is hard to learn, but believe me, you won’t regret learning it.

Anyway, I just want to share my .vimrc (config file of Vim) for my fellow Vim users out there. I got the tips from Vim’s homepage, so they’re the ones who deserve credits.

Bash, which stands for Bourne-again shell, is a free Unix shell which is used also as a default command line for most Linux distribution. If you’re a Linux/Unix administrator or a Linux enthusiast, I’m pretty sure you’ve met the bash shell before.

These are some tricks in bash shell that I really find useful.

1. Don’t use backticks, use $( command ) instead.

I admit, this is one of the first tricks that I learned also. It’s quite adequate if you’re running just one command:

date_today=`date`

but if you’re planning to nest multiple commands:

current_pid=`cat $HOME/pid/my_pid.\`date +%y%m%d\`.pid`

Yes, you have to escape the backticks. Now, imagine if you have to nest 3 commands… What do you think it will look like?